Posts tagged with: ecumenical-industrial complex

A delegate at last week’s Uniting General Council of the World Communion of Reformed Churches held at Calvin College urged the newly formed group to consider moving its headquarters out of the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva. Citing the costs associated with travel to and from the Swiss city, as well as those incurred during visits to the headquarters, Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, asked the WCRC to move its offices to the global south.

This would be a show of solidarity as well as of acknowledgment of the shifting movement of the center of global Christianity to the southern Hemisphere. According to ENI, Granberg-Michaelson “questioned how the Reformed grouping could talk of promoting global justice, when it had its headquarters in a place of ‘significant economic privilege.'”

There’s a lot going on in this call, and more than I can comment on here. But I will say that I think this is a move that ought to be considered, but not primarily for the reasons Granberg-Michaelson raises (although there are some valid concerns there as well).

In my recent book, Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness, I argue that one of the distinctive features of the ecumenical movement over the last two decades or so is what I call the ecumenical-industrial complex, “in which the ecumenical movement is promoted, through the media and political engagement, as an end in itself rather than as a church in service to others.”

Anything that can serve to mitigate some of the group think that goes on in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva is something to be applauded, I think.